Lies
by Le Masque31
Summary: "I am Lord Voldemort, he longed to say, but what good would it do him?" Memories are Lord Voldemort's personal hell. Rated for violence. No pairing.


**A/N:** I know that some of you may consider my interpretation of Lord Voldemort's character unusual and, probably, downright wrong. Personally, I could never agree with the he-was-born-evil explanation. In short, if you do not like a more human view of Voldemort, then I daresay this story is not for you.

**Disclaimer:** Not mine.

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He was trapped; he was alone. Lord Voldemort fell to his knees beside the grand mirror in his private chambers. The glass was framed with slender silver serpents, so finely carved that the sinuous ripple in their lithe bodies seemed as smooth and entrancing as moonlit water; but the Dark Lord saw neither the inanimate snakes nor his own Nagini hissing out clumsy queries laden with concern.

It was a wholly internal world that held his attention, and, oddly enough, he felt choked as though by the coils of a great serpent, and sickened, too, by the feel of it. Before his eyes was a boy, backed up against a rough stone wall by a gang of bullies. The boy was scrawny, and a slap across the face sent him sprawling across bare, grassless turf. He drew breath to scream, to tell the teenagers to leave him alone, but the air was knocked out of him as a boot collided with his ribs; he heard as if from a great distance, through a haze of pain, the sound of his bones snapping from the force of the blow.

"Freak!" the oldest boy spat, kicking him again. "You're a freak, Riddle!"

Voldemort could still remember the words that had risen involuntarily to his lips—their shape as he tried to form them: _I know_. They died in his throat, though, voiceless yet perennially true, as he was yanked upward by the hair and thrown to the ground with such brutal gusto that his teeth tore through his upper lip.

Thin arms snaked round his own torso as he rocked back and forth, maps forgotten on the bed; the miniature model of Hogwarts so cleanly printed on a square piece of parchment had slipped his mind, driven out by the tsunami of memories that was looming black and threatening over his last rational thoughts; his own additions—diagram-like drawings of defensive positions, curses written in his own small, elegant hand to be given to the Death Eaters for meticulous study—had suffered the selfsame fate.

A hospital now flashed in his mind, a cheerless, dank room that smelled of blood and musty peeling wallpaper. He was alone and in pain; his mouth was throbbing even through its grotesque swelling, and his broken ribs forced him to take shallow, wheezing breaths to delay the sharp pain of inhalation. His face was turned sideways, halfway buried in the pillow and stained with fresh tears. He clung to a fantasy, a lovely, impossible fantasy, to keep those thoughts he knew he should not be entertaining at bay: he imagined his father striding through the creaking doors of the ward, showering his son with apologies and words of love by turns; but he never came—not even when days turned into weeks, and the bare yellowed walls towering over his bed morphed into the dirty, gray ones of the orphanage.

The Dark Lord was crying softly to himself now, still rocking backwards and forwards, hands clutching at his own skull in a futile attempt at protection. _I am Lord Voldemort_, he longed to say, but what good would it do him?

"Lord Voldemort, eh?" a boy was saying to his fifteen-year-old self. "Mad as a hatter, ain't you, Riddle? You think you're bloody smart, going off to that school of yours. Well, I'll tell you what, you're bloody worthless, scum, no better than the rest of us." The boy ripped out the page in his diary on which he had inked his new name back in his dormitory at Hogwarts. He tried not to think of the fact that his classmates had reacted in much the same way, not daring to voice their dissent, of course, for the spineless idiots feared him, but he saw the furtive glances all the same—those glances that questioned his place among them.

The boy in his memory tossed his diary into the mud with a careless flick of the wrist. Hatred bubbled within him, a black, pungent pestilence, and his fingers itched to grasp his yew wand and teach the Muggle his rightful place. But he didn't; he told himself that it was self-preservation, avoiding a stint in Azkaban; however, he could not deny, even now, so many decades later, that an inner voice that sounded too much like himself for his own comfort traitorously whispered words of assent: _I know_.

He could not deny the pain, hot and heavy, that used to settle in his chest whenever a fellow student muttered that hateful word with a pointed glower in his general direction: "Half-blood." The Slytherin clique, the crème de la crème of the school, derided him and his blood status, dubbing him a plague on the noble house of Salazar Slytherin—a thing unworthy of such honor.

Nor could he deny the sting of that old coot's words—how he had longed to believe him, and when he finally did believe him, when he finally allowed himself to believe him, Dumbledore turned and questioned him on his ability to speak to snakes in that guarded, suspicious tone he would always adopt with Tom from that day forth.

Nagini's scales were cool and sleek beneath his palm as she nudged against him. He thought of companionship, of love—of all the Death Eaters who, trailing misery and mayhem after them, retired at night to their families, kissing their wives and holding their children. He realized, too late perhaps, that he did not believe in his own words, his lofty encomiums of power.

With a scowl, he pushed himself to his feet. His plans for tomorrow's battle required his immediate attention. The little boy from his memories—the eleven-year-old who desperately wished to believe in magic—seemed to stare at him, aghast and hurt. _How can you do this?_ he seemed to ask, tears welling in his eyes; _do you hold nothing sacred anymore?_

Voldemort's features hardened into the mask he presented to the world. "You're dead," he stated out loud, cool indifference freezing his ability to feel; but the boy still stared, stubborn and undaunted. "They lied," the Dark Lord murmured under his breath, in a voice quite unlike his customary frigid hiss, averting his eyes from nothing in particular.


End file.
